Page 114 of Tag

I knew I represented safety for her. I made sure of that. So her not telling me about the window incident was all the morefrustrating. But I wouldn’t let that overshadow the fact that she was finally accepting the inevitable. A realization I’d had for a long time solidified in my bones.

Therapy had worked.

That had to be the only explanation for how I kept walking away from her when I was wound this fucking tight. Some of it stuck. Not the parts they hoped would mold me into some balanced, neutered good boy. But enough to keep me from ripping apart anyone I felt deserved it. Cade had gone too, his sessions separate from mine.

When our dad made us go, it wasn’t about some fantasy of fixing us. It was about preventing us from becoming the worst versions of him because he knew those intimately. Billy Voss had a nickname among his old circle—Marrow.

Not Bones.

Marrow.

Given to him because he didn’t just break people. He stripped them down to the core. Hollowed them out until nothing but the soft, vital center remained, the part that hurt the most when touched.

His hobby for breaking men and women aside, Billy Voss was a good father. Flawed. Still unhinged at times. But he loved us, in his own violent, unwavering way. And he tried to do right by all of us, even if it meant forcing us into chairs across from therapists who flinched when we smiled. I remembered what one in particular told me. Dr. Hadler. A woman with a velvet voice and knife-blade smile. She thought she could unravel my mind with mantras and excessive eye contact.

She was the one I ruined.

I fucked her over her desk while she sobbed for more, her voice breaking on my name, and then clawed at me every session after that like a starved animal.

I filmed every second.

Then I blackmailed her into signing off on my progress reports. It got me exactly what I wanted, and her? Far less than she deserved. I made sure she’d never counsel another kid like me again. For all her sins, she’d said one thing that stuck with me.

“Your problem isn’t anger or control, Ryder. Your problem is that you mistake obsession for connection.”

She was right—and she was so, so wrong.

With Sass, it wasn’t one or the other. It was both. A violent kind of merge. Our bond was etched into me like a scar I refused to let heal, an infection I let fester because I craved the sickness of it more than any cure. It didn’t matter how many masks I wore now, how carefully I played the golden boy. Beneath it all, I was still the boy who decided she was mine before he knew what it meant.

Ryder from a few years ago wouldn’t have walked away tonight.

He would’ve stayed.

He would’ve kissed her until she forgot her own fucking name. Touched every inch of her until she could never lie to either of us ever again. He would have broken her apart and had her begging for something she didn’t have the words to name.

Instead, I held back like a true gentleman who knew how to strategize, for her sake and mine, because if Ashton ever so much as looked at her again after I had split her open and filled every inch with me, I wouldn’t just end him. I’d end us all.

I dragged my hands down my face, forcing my breathing to even out. I needed to get the image of her under me out of my fucking head before I did something catastrophic. It was worse than that night I held her close in the driveway. Now I had the memory of that desperate little sound she made lodged in my skull. I knew exactly how wet she got from just my words and a fraction of my weight pressing into her.

“Logic over emotion,” I muttered under my breath, jaw flexing. I glanced down at my dick, painfully hard, like it was my sworn enemy. “Logic over emotion,” I repeated to it.

This was torture.

I prayed this would get easier after we finally fucked a few dozen times, but I knew better. If it were just lust, maybe. This was much more than that. She didn’t just turn me on. She unmade me. Now that I’d seen what she looked like wanting me back, I didn’t want to fuck her to get her out of my system. I wanted to fuck her until shebecamemy system.

I had the same amount of time she did to get my shit straightened out, mentally, and fortunately for me, I had more than enough tasks to fill the hours in between.

I had working out at the campus gym before sunrise, followed by a Business Communications course and then my usual classes for the day. Football practice tomorrow night. A Social Contracts paper was due next Tuesday. Helping Nick finalize the vendors for the Soirée. Then, finally, there would be the drive home this weekend, where it would all start to come together.

My phone lit up just as I prepared to get out of the truck.Xander.I answered before the second ring.

“I take it you’re at your place?”

“Yeah,” he answered. In the background, I heard gunfire—virtual, not real, and the low rumble of Nick’s voice bleeding through Xander’s headset. “Mic’s muted so Zoe can’t hear anything on her side,” he added.

“Alright, go on.”

“I got something off Lindsey’s phone. It came through on the clone.”

---